'Secret wife' of late Saudi king wins payout worth more than £20m

High court judge rules Saudi royal family must honour promise that Janan Harb would be looked after for the rest of her life

The Guardian, Tuesday 3 November 2015

Janan Harb told the court she married King Fahd in 1968, when she
was 19. Photograph: REX Shutterstock

A woman who claims to be the secret wife of the late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia has won a payout worth more than £20m to honour a promise that she would be looked after for the rest of her life.

Palestinian-born Janan Harb, 68, claimed she had lived a cosseted life in the embrace of one of the world’s richest and most secretive families for more than 20 years and had married Fahd in 1968.

The Saudi royal family has fought her claims through the high court for more than a decade, insisting that no official marriage took place and that she was owed nothing.

On Monday, however, a judge ruled in Harb’s favour, saying she was entitled to more than £15m plus the value of two expensive west London properties.

Mr Justice Peter Smith also ordered Fahd’s son, Prince Abdul Aziz, to pay legal costs estimated at more than £1m.

The prince, who did not attend the court hearings to counter Harb’s claims, must pay damages of £12m with interest of £3.25m for leaving her without her money for years.

Smith also ordered the prince to transfer two luxury flats in Chelsea worth around £5m to her name, making a total award of £20.25m.

As she left court, Harb said: “I am very very happy. This has been 12 years of misery for me. I am very happy with British justice, otherwise they wanted me to go to Saudi Arabia where they could have stoned me.

“I am very relieved and only wish the prince could have honoured what his father wanted and stopped delaying things. He is just being very mean.”

Harb told the court she had secretly married Fahd in 1968, when she was 19 and he was still a prince and his country’s interior minister.

Born to Christian hoteliers in Ramallah, she said she had met her future husband the year before in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where she was working as a translator at the Venezuelan embassy.

She said she had accompanied him on trips to Europe and the US, and that she had been introduced to world leaders and wealthy businessmen.

Harb said she was banished from Saudi Arabia by the king’s immediate family in 1970 after they “wrongly” blamed her for his addiction to methadone. She thought then that banishment had led to a divorce.

She has also said that although Fahd had other wives, he continued to keep in touch with her after she married a second man, a Lebanese lawyer, in 1974.

By the late 1970s, Harb also had a home in London and two daughters and had set up an aerobics franchise, opening branches in Europe and the Middle East.

Fahd would occasionally fly to London in his private jet to visit her, but their marriage was dictated by his schedule, friends said.

Harb has said she continued a relationship with Fahd until he suffered a stroke in 1995, and that his advisers were enraged when it emerged that she had abandoned Islam to become a Scientologist.

Monday’s court case rested upon her claim that Abdul Aziz, the son of another of Fahd’s wives, had met her at the Dorchester hotel in London on 20 June 2003 when the king was seriously ill.

She said he agreed in the early hours of the morning to pay her £12m and transfer two flats in Cheyne Walk to her name, to honour his father’s promise of lifelong financial support.

The prince made written statements to the court denying her claim, but Smith ruled that there had been an agreement.

He said Harb has received £5m from the Saudis in the past, but that she has used £3m of it to pay off debts, including an £85,000 gambling debt, before spending the balance within two years on what he described as her lavish lifestyle.

He said: “It is fair to say that she maintained a high maintenance lifestyle as she says, to which she had become accustomed whilst being supported by the late king.”

Smith added that the £5m “was plainly payment to buy her silence in respect of her relationship with the late king”.

He also said that while her evidence was unsure and at times bizarre, he believed she was telling the truth about the 2003 agreement with Abdul Aziz.

Harb intially launched a much larger claim against the Saudi royal family in 2004. Fahd, however, died the following year aged 82, and the high court ruled that her previous £400m maintenance claim died with him.

Critics tear their hair over Malaysia PM's wife

Yahoo – AFP, 24 Ferbuary 2015

Malaysia's first lady, Rosmah Mansor, pictured during an 

interview with AFP, in Putrajaya, in 2009 (Photo: Saeed Khan/AFP)

The wife of Malaysia's prime minister, who is widely mocked over reports of her taste for luxury, drew fresh scorn on Tuesday after she complained about the rising cost of house calls from hairdressers and tailors.

Rosmah Mansor, 63, is a controversial figure in Malaysia, where she is routinely portrayed by critics as out of touch with ordinary citizens struggling to make ends meet.

The wife of Prime Minister Najib Razak handed her critics new fuel with comments on Monday lamenting the 1,200 ringgit ($330) she has to spend on house calls by stylists to dye her substantial head of hair, and 500 ringgit for tailored dresses.

"We have to make beautiful clothes to attend functions, but the prices are way too high. For those who can afford, it's all right. But what about housewives like us, with no income?" she was quoted as saying by the Malaysian Insider news portal.

Malaysia's minimum wage is 900 ringgit per month, though critics say it is seldom enforced.

Rosmah made the comments at a public event to discuss the introduction of a new consumer tax in April.

"Is this woman for real? Some families have to live on what she pays to have her hair dyed," said one Facebook user, among a flood of social media postings poking fun at her on Tuesday.

Said a post on Twitter: "I hope to become a poor housewife of a civil servant just like you Rosmah."

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak (C-L) arrives with his wife Rosmah 

Mansor for an official dinner in Nusa Dua, on Indonesia's island of Bali, in 

October 2013 (Photo: Dita Alangkara/AFP)

Since her husband took office in 2009, Rosmah has faced periodic criticism over reports of luxury overseas shopping sprees.

The New York Times ran a report earlier this month detailing purchases of high-end US real estate by people close to Najib, and said it also had obtained documents showing millions of dollars in jewellery purchases for Rosmah.

In a statement to AFP after the New York Times report, the prime minister's office said "We prefer not to comment on unsourced speculation concerning the private finances and spending of the prime minister and his family."

Malaysian police on February 14 seized a shipment of books lampooning Najib and Rosmah by one of the country's best-known political cartoonists.

Last year an opposition lawmaker was charged with sedition for producing a satirical video that included a character widely viewed as representing Rosmah.

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British expat's 'poor people' remark sparks outrage in Singapore

Google – AFP, 22 January 2014

Commuters stands at the doorway of a crowded train on the Singapore

subway on February 13, 2013 (AFP/File, Roslan Rahman)

Singapore — A Porsche-driving British wealth manager in Singapore who referred to public transport commuters as "poor people" has apologised after his Facebook posts sparked an online furore.

Anton Casey, a 39-year-old senior wealth manager in the financial sector, had also referred to washing "the stench of public transport off me" in one of his posts on the social network.

Furious online readers flooded websites on which his remarks were reposted with comments, many of which subjected him and his family to verbal abuse.

Singapore has one of the world's highest annual GDP per capita incomes with official data showing it stood at Sg$65,048 ($50,890) in 2012. The city-state also boasts one of Asia's most modern public transport systems, with its 150-kilometre (93-mile) metro network carrying about two million people daily.

Highrise housing apartment buildings

 in Singapore on January 14, 2013

(AFP/File, Roslan Rahman)

"I would like to extend a sincere apology to the people of Singapore," Casey said in a statement issued through a public relations firm late Tuesday.

"I have the highest respect and regard for Singapore and the good people of Singapore; this is my home," said the permanent resident, who is married to a former Singapore beauty queen with whom he has a five-year-old son.

"I wish for nothing more than to be forgiven for my poor judgement and given a second chance to rebuild the trust people have had in me as a resident of this wonderful country."

One of Casey's posts showed a picture of a boy, apparently his son, sitting inside a metro train with a caption above the photo saying: "Daddy, where is your car & who are all these poor people?"

Another showed a waving boy sitting inside a silver convertible Porsche, with a caption saying: "Ahhhhhhhh reunited with my baby. Normal service can resume, once I have washed the stench of public transport off me."

As the Facebook posts went viral online, a YouTube video of Casey later emerged on various websites in which he appeared to be taunting his critics.

But Casey in his statement denied that the video was made in response to the online furore.

He said it was an old video that had been "misused" by "unknown sources" in order to portray him as unrepentant.

Casey also said there had been a "security breach" of his Facebook page and that his family had "suffered extreme emotional and verbal abuse online".

Police were investigating death threats received by his family, he added.

"This guy is rich materially but poor spiritually," a reader named Tony Tan wrote on TheRealSingapore, one of the online publications that reposted Casey's Facebook comments.

Another reader named Michael Ryan wrote: "Why oh why do you think you are so much better than others just because you happen to have cash... Shame on you mate, shame!"

Related Article:

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Iranians mock Netanyahu over jeans comment

BBC News, 7 October 2013

Jeans are readily available in Tajrish Bazaar in Tehran

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Iranians have used social media to mock Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, after he suggested they were not allowed to wear jeans.

In an interview with BBC Persian TV Mr Netanyahu said that if Iranians were free they would wear blue jeans, and listen to Western music.

Hundreds of Iranians both in Iran and abroad reacted on social media sites.

Many posts showed mainly young Iranians wearing jeans and listening to Western music, some in comic poses.

Others mocked up scenes from ancient Persian history with the protagonists wearing denim.

Jeans are not banned in Iran, where an Islamic dress code requires women to cover their hair and wear modest outer clothing. Some Western music or Western-style music is tolerated.

Jeans not bombs

One picture on social media sites showed a young boy in jeans whispering into the ear of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Another is a doctored photograph of Mr Netanyahu's address at the UN last year in which he drew a red line across a sketch of a bomb, to warn that Iran was moving closer to the metaphorical "red line" of gaining enough highly-enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb.

In the mocked-up picture, widely-shared on Twitter, the bomb has been replaced with a picture of a female figure wearing jeans, with the Israeli prime minister appearing to draw a red line across the thighs.

In the BBC Persian interview, broadcast on Friday, Mr Netanyahu said that Iranians "deserve better" than their current government:

"I think if the Iranian people had their way, they'd be wearing blue jeans, they'd have Western music, they'd have free elections."

The Israel's prime minister also said that the lives of Iranians could get worse if it gained nuclear weapons.

One Iranian response on a Facebook page that has attracted hundreds of followers read: "He thinks he saw our bomb but he hasn't seen our jeans."

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Holland Style – big hit in China (Video)

RNW, 5 December 2012

Dissident Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei has given a thumbs up to the video Holland Style produced by RNW’s Chinese department. The dissident is amongst more than a quarter of a million people who have seen the film since it was published two weeks ago.

The number of shares and likes is still rising as the video continues to go viral on a host of Chinese social media platforms.

The film is an adaptation of the world famous Gangnam Style dance craze – but then with a Dutch twist, hence the name Holland Style. Using dance and humour, the film shows iconic Dutch images – cows, tulips, windmills and polders – but gives them a modern flavour. (Look out for the DJ in the cow shed.)

The video is the brainchild of our Chinese department. They enlisted the help of two young Chinese students who have set up their own independent film studio in the Netherlands, Moment4us. 

On YouTube (+Lyrics)

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Chinese Newspaper That Tried To Report On An Official's Luxurious Lifestyle Had Thousands Of Copies Destroyed

Business Insider, Adam Taylor, Oct. 10, 2012

City Times, a newspaper in the Chinese province of Yunnan, was due to publish a controversial story recently about a local official, Fujian Communication Department director Li Dejin, and his controversial lifestyle — stating that he wears a watch worth 50,000 yuan ($7,930) and a belt worth 13,000 yuan ($2,000).

The article was published in a paper in Yunnan, thousands of miles away from Fujian province, apparently in an effort to evade censorship. That effort failed, and the article was spiked after pressure from the local government, Shanghaiist reports. Thousands of copies of the newspaper were pulped.

A few years ago, this would have been the end of the story, but this being modern-day China, the article found a new home - Weibo. And pictures of Li's watches spread like wildfire:

Weibo via Shanghaiist

Xinhua reports that one post containing details of the story forwarded almost 100,000 times in just two days, while the editor of City Times has wrote a message that said he was ashamed that the copies were withdrawn, and it was because "someone behind the curtains from far away."

Perhaps the most remarkable response has come from the state-run newspaper Global Times. "Chinese media outlets are constantly frustrated by interference from special interest groups, sometimes even powerful individuals," the paper complained in an editorial.

"The more influential the outlet is, the more interventions it may suffer. This has put traditional media in a disadvantageous position compared to online media."

The story echoes the recent case of Yang Dacai, head of the Shaanxi Provincial Bureau of Work Safety, who was fired earlier this year after photos of him wearing expensive watches circulated on Weibo.

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"The Timing of the Great Shift" – Mar 21, 2009 (Kryon channelled by Lee Carroll) - (Text version)

“ … Here is another one. A change in what Human nature will allow for government. "Careful, Kryon, don't talk about politics. You'll get in trouble." I won't get in trouble. I'm going to tell you to watch for leadership that cares about you. "You mean politics is going to change?" It already has. It's beginning. Watch for it. You're going to see a total phase-out of old energy dictatorships eventually. The potential is that you're going to see that before 2013. They're going to fall over, you know, because the energy of the population will not sustain an old energy leader..."

“.. These leaders are going to fall over. You'll have a slow developing leadership coming to you all over the earth where there is a new energy of caring about the public. "That's just too much to ask for in politics, Kryon." Watch for it. That's just the beginning of this last phase…”

Kim Jong-II spends £120,000 on food for his dogs, as six million North Koreans starve

Daily Mail, by NADIA GILANI, 30th September 2011

Extravagant: North Korean dictator
 Kim Jong-Il lives a lavish lifestyle
 while people in the country he
leads live in poverty

While his nation starves, North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-Il has been spending £120,000 a year on his dogs, it has been revealed.

The allegations were made in a report presented to the country's parliament leaked by a South Korean MP.

Nearly six million North Koreans - a quarter of the population - live in extreme poverty due to food shortages in the country.

A third of children under five are reported to suffer from malnutrition.

MP Yoon Sang Hyun said the dictator's regime had purchased around 600 bottles of fine French wine that were consumed at parties for senior party and military officials last year.

He said the dictator had also imported several dozen Russian horses, and bought ten US jet skis for his son and heir Kim Jong Eun.

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Most of the luxury goods had been purchased through China - the North's sole major ally, and Russia, he said.

If found to be true, the dictator's actions will have breached United Nations Security Council sanctions banning the export of luxury items to the communist state

The sanctions were imposed after the North's missile and nuclear tests.

Mr San Hyun, a member of the ruling conservative Grand National Party in South Korea said: 'The luxury life for Kim Jong-il's family goes on regardless of the worsening suffering of North Koreans amid the third-generation succession.'

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All aboard: The cars here a Maserati MC12, Rolls Royce Phantom
Coupe and an Aston Martin V8

India's city-dwellers get angrier as society changes

RNW, 26 December 2010

With its religious retreats for meditation and yoga, India has long been sought out by Western visitors eager to escape the rat race and return home better prepared to face life's challenges.

India's city-dwellers get angrier as society changes

Big cities like New Delhi and Mumbai, however, are becoming anything but havens of spiritual calm and inner peace for ordinary Indians, as the country's economy grows and more people leave the rural heartlands in search of prosperity.

Anger has become a feature of daily life, with concerns raised about the harmful side-effects of modern, urban living on the nation's health and well-being.

"There's so much anger. It's everywhere," Yusuf Matcheswalla, a leading Mumbai psychiatrist, told AFP.

"There's anger on the roads, anger in the schools, anger in the workplace, anger in the house, anger in parliament with the politicians... Everyone we meet is getting angry."

Matcheswalla, who runs counselling centres in India's financial capital, said he and colleagues have seen a steady rise in patients coming to them with anger-related issues.

It's not hard to see why tempers might flare in an overcrowded city like Mumbai, where the demands of an estimated 18 million inhabitants stretch outdated infrastructure and the supply of basic services to breaking point.

Badly-maintained, potholed roads are regularly gridlocked, making even the shortest trip a lengthy ordeal of honking horns and choking exhaust fumes from crawling or stationary traffic.

Local trains, which are the fastest and cheapest way to avoid the jams, often carry more than three times their official capacity.

Electricity and water shortages are commonplace, while construction work and ear-splitting celebrations for India's many religious festivals add to high levels of noise pollution.

Urban India is changing fast, with technological innovations and a burgeoning consumer culture catering to a growing middle class with more disposable income, widening the gap between haves and have-nots.

Newer working patterns are also emerging, including more women going to work, and a decline in couples living in the traditional joint family structure, removing support networks and adding childcare pressures.

"When you work in a city like Mumbai you're always very stressed. You get frustrated and angry and lose patience very quickly," said Aryan, a 24-year-old professional.

Matcheswalla says such feelings are common, with the "work hard, play harder" culture in India's "Maximum City" and elsewhere -- plus the often bewildering array of choices in the new consumer economy not helping matters.

A build-up of daily frustrations and the increased use of caffeine, tobacco, alcohol or recreational drugs to cope or unwind are leaving a generation unable to relax and more likely to see red, he added.

"We're not able to deal with any minor provocation. There's a big backlash and micropsychotic episodes. They lose touch with reality and don't see the consequences," he said.

A young girl was recently thrown out of a Mumbai train after an argument over sharing a seat, while "road rage" incidents are regularly documented in India's media.

Doctors point to urban living for the increase in lifestyle diseases in India, including heart disease, which is now the country's number one killer.

Prolonged stress, a rise in smoking, lack of exercise and a diet of high-fat, Western-style junk food often bought as a sign of wealth and status are blamed.

"It's a combination of everything," said Ramakanta Panda, a leading cardiologist from the prestigious Asian Heart Institute in Mumbai, who in 2009 performed bypass surgery on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

"Research has found higher incidences of heart problems in urban areas compared with rural areas and when people from rural areas migrate, again the incidences go up."

Vikram Kalloo is a life coach who runs well-being classes for strung-out city executives and their staff on how to recognise and handle stress, achieve a better work-life balance and deal with anger.

"The crux of it is awareness," he said. "Many people are not willing to accept it. Either they are not well informed or in a state of denial about it."

Kalloo said modern, urban India seemed to be forgetting its traditional, spiritual roots.

"People are running but where are they heading? It's maybe just a stage, like growing pains," he said.

But he said India's authorities needed to address the lack of open spaces in cities while the corporate firms that are driving the country's economic growth had to become more aware of their employees' well-being.

"Stress is growing exponentially. People are getting stressed out, frustrated," he added.

"People say it's part of Western living. But at least in the Western world you have great infrastructure: you have parks, beaches and other public places, a better work-life balance, your own space, which is not the case here.

"Here it's money, money, money."

Aryan, at least, says he has calmed down and regained a perspective through yoga, meditation and concentrating on enjoying the smaller things in life.

"I've learnt how to deal with anger... If it's required then fine but now I think, 'what's the point?'," he said.

Hajj Nurse In Trouble For Mixing With Men

Jakarta Globe, Bilhuda Haryanto | October 17, 2010

Jakarta. An Indonesian nurse who was working with the hajj organizing committee will be deported from Saudi Arabia after being found in a room with three Arab men.

Some female members of the Indonesian pilgrimage group became suspicious on Friday when they heard giggling coming from the drivers’ quarters. Dessi NRP, 25, from Palembang, South Sumatra, was later discovered without her compulsory head scarf.

Women in Saudi Arabia are not allowed to be alone with men who are not their husband, while head scarves, known as the hijab, must be worn at all times outside of private homes.

“When everyone was observing Friday prayer, she entered the drivers’ room, saying she needed to use the bathroom,” Subakin Abdul Munthalib, the chief of the Indonesian Hajj Organizing Committee for Medina, said on Sunday.

“She then told the men that she had a headache and asked one of them to give her a head massage before resting her head on the man’s thigh.”

Dessi said she was in the room because she had a headache and needed to use the bathroom and did not do anything wrong.

After the incident, deemed embarrassing to the Indonesian hajj organizers, Subakin asked the nursing agency that employed Dessi to send her home.

“She is assigned to serve as an officer at the hajj committee in Medina,” he said.

“She’s supposed to abide by the law enforced in Saudi Arabia. It’s different with the law in place in Indonesia.”

Restrained by religious, family and tribal traditions that dictate who a woman may marry, many are choosing to appeal to Saudi Arabia’s courts in order to overturn what many women see as unfair or illogical opposition to marriage by fathers and other male relatives. (AFP Photo/ Amer Hilabi)

Love mountain: Many large villas dot the hills of North and South Tugu villages, in the mountainous Puncak area, Bogor, West Java. While the area is known as a weekend getaway for wealthy Indonesians, it is also a popular spot where Arab tourists marry Indonesian women unofficially for a short period of time.

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Saud Abdulaziz bin Nasser al Saud (L) is seen with his servant Bandar Abdulaziz in an elevator in London's Landmark hotel on January 22, 2010, in closed circuit television footage which was shown during a murder trial in London on October 5, 2010. (Credit: REUTERS/Metropolitan Police/handout)